


Scorched Sand

by merryfortune



Category: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Canon Retelling, F/M, Gore, Minor or Implied Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:26:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24889090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merryfortune/pseuds/merryfortune
Summary: Eirika sets her eyes on the enemy general, Valter.
Relationships: Eirika/Valter (Fire Emblem)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	Scorched Sand

Some legends, as it were, are true. Forever and always.

Some aren’t true. It’s silly to think that one might be cursed with seven years bad luck if they were to break a mirror. Or that umbrellas shouldn’t be opened indoors for similar such reasons of superstition.

But there was one legend which stood out amongst all the myths and tall tales as being inhospitably true.

Eirika would know. She and Ephraim were born of such a legend.

On every person’s wrist, in varying scripts and handwriting, were the last things that a soulmate will speak to you before they die. Their father’s wrist had “Good night, honey, sleep well, Ephraim, Eirika, dearests, behave for your father, have sweet dreams.” and their mother had passed away in relation to consequences of unexpectedly giving birth to twins. There had been so much blood, they had been told but their mother held onto them dearly as they wailed and whilst she nodded off to an eternal sleep. Their father only able to watch as his wife succumbed to these natural causes.

Their mother’s wrist read once, in a fanciful script of spring green, “You are so strong, my love.”

Their father said that when he had unwittingly spoken those cursed and fateful words, his blood ran cold. That he was as white as a sheet of freshly pressed parchment. He wept and wailed, just like they, the newborn babies.

So, yes, as far as Eirika was concerned soulmates were real. It was just a shame that she had no hope for her own. A garbled mess in cobalt blue. In thin, elongated strokes of chicken scratch. She considered it highly improper. Nothing at all romantic.

She remembered very well to finally be old enough – a young child – to understand what the words on her wrist signified in the grander scale. Her hopes had been dashed most coldly to have been given nonsense like she had. Especially compared to her brother. He thought it was highly unfair and a system easily gamed.

In a way, Ephraim was envious of her. He sometimes thought that something had gone wrong in the womb. That the skin of his wrist was supposed to be the skin of Eirika’s wrist if he was going to have the more humble, more cynical outlook on such fanciful things such as soulmates as compared to her. She who believed and got pittance from the universe and from the gods in return.

I will remember you always and will always treasure the time you spent visiting me, thank you so much, was written on Ephraim’s wrist. He found it morbid. Eirika thought it was darkly romantic.

Regardless, Ephraim had no desire to meet the person whose words were emblazoned on his skin. He wore long and thick gloves to evade people’s curiosities. Oh, what joy it would be to be the Prince of Renais’ soulmate, yes?

Eirika, meanwhile, only took to wearing gloves because the hilt of her sword was hard to grip for long hours. She had never expected that she would have to wield it in war but alas, that was exactly what the world had come to. Covering up the mark on her wrist felt strangely good. Out of sight, out of mind. War was no place for romance and other whimsy to flourish.

But girls being girls, the light-hearted and jovial things that they were, managed to work in such talk on the interim of fights and bathing. Sharing tents with her companions, both new and old, the topic was bound to come up eventually in such close quarters. Tana found it hopeful; she spoke with eyes wide when she revealed the writing on her wrist to Eirika and L’Arachel. Eirika had seen it before but that was so long ago now, with war hanging over their heads, it was possible this out of context soundbite was a lot closer than they feared, or so she worried. L’Arachel, meanwhile, had no such anxieties. And if she did have them, they were filtered through that eccentric worldview of hers, becoming alienated from the more grounded reality which Eirika and Tana saw.

She was positively certain that her parents were soulmates. Even with no way to confirm it. She was also positively certain that she would meet her own soulmate and that they would share a grand and timely love which would result in a story, a legend of their own, which would persist with the ages. Tana could only laugh when she heard that. Eirika was slightly grimmer to that but she could clink elegant glasses of drinks, soft and hard, to the timely part. All she could hope was that her death was far away and same for the person fated to be her beloved.

Eirika wasn’t sure why but ever since the Castle of Renais had fallen, she had felt oddly out of place. She assumed it was because she disliked knowing her childhood home – symbolic of a greater thing given its status as a place of royalty – had fallen to their enemy who had once been their friend. It was a horrible circumstance, after all, but the niggle went beyond such things of piety. There was something else to it.

Something which burned her wrist beneath her glove.

Eirika was certain that it was purely mental. She had so many things to worry about that picking something innocuous and irrelevant was simply a coping mechanism, perhaps. By keeping her mind full with it, she wouldn’t have to keep truer, scarier thoughts. It was all groundless. Shifting. But she was wrong.

Jehanna was a beautiful place, she thought. Beautiful and dangerous. Even if it and them weren’t under attack, it would be dangerous. All searing, white sands, stretches upon stretches of dunes without any water. No clouds in the sky. Just the blinding blue of a hot sky. One wrong move out here and you were a goner, she thought as she trekked on. Crossing these sands, crossing these odds which seemed insurmountable at the foot of them.

She had to survive. She had to stay focused. And as the leader of this army, tiny and worn as it may be, and as the acting princess of her land, it would be she who would slay the enemy general. The Moonstone.

He wasn’t a handsome man, is what struck Eirika as she tried to get a good look at him so that she could better understand how to bring him down. His hair was long, unkempt with greasy and knotted waves, but it was a brilliant cobalt, she had to admit. His face was harsh. Especially in the sun. He wore armour which was dark and discoloured with use. Propped up on his wyvern, he looked every bit of a beast as is it.

So Eirika told herself to kill it first. Bring him to his feet and then pierce through his gut twice fold to take his life. His armour plating seemed weaker around his midsection, all wrought with taut, maroon leather – than anywhere on his body clad in the dismal purple that he wore.

Vanessa and Seth flanked her rear guard, Valter’s own assault guard charged forth leaving them alone in the shambles and sand. Despite the skirmish, the clanking of steel against steel, it was weirdly silent between them as Eirika readied her blade. A rapier, fine as silk and freshly repaired from the blacksmith. She took a deep breath and she found fine words in her raw throat to dismiss Valter with.

But, quick as a lethal whip, Valter bade her hello first.

“Mmm… I’ve been waiting for you, Eirika.”

His words were slow. Delicious. Came patiently between the sturdy beats of his wyvern’s wings. Its tail and claws just dragging in the thinnest surface of the sand below. His words irked Eirika; plucked at her brow like a devil harp. He spoke as though he knew her. Intimately.

“Who are you?” she asked, a glare gracing her face. She knew him as The Moonstone and nothing more than another wicked villain in her path to rightness.

Valter was keenly upset to hear that. He bared his teeth – his fangs, off-white, yellowing – to her and took a deep breath through his nostrils. Hostility flared off him but his grip on the reins of his wyvern tightened in comfort of this defiance that Eirika was showing him. No doubt imagining the leather to be the soft skin of her neck.

“Have you forgotten? We met once at Castle Renais. No? Look closely, Eirika. Do you not remember the face of he who will master you?” Valter drawled, pushing his shoulders back to appear magnificently.

“What?!” Eirika sputtered, eyes widening.

Valter grinned maniacally. “Yes, resist. It's much more fun for me that way. Come, Eirika. I should like to tame you.”

“I am here on a mission. One that I swore to my brother I would fulfil. I will not be stopped by the likes of you!” Eirika proclaimed.

Her heart beat loudly and heavily in her chest. She felt hot. Very hot. Beneath the harsh sunlight of Jehanna’s environment. But she steeled herself as she looked up the harsh curves of the wyvern’s body and made her attack. With deft, almost dancer-like feet, Eirika came closer and she raised her sword to the creature. She effortlessly carved through its underbelly with ease. Where its belly was that poison purple, with cream smooth scales, Eirika was able to tear through its flesh and disembowel it. Blood rained from above and she was quick to get out of the shower. Even as her feet sank into sand as she remained so light of foot.

Behind her, Valter came crashing down. His wyvern screaming its draconic perish song. It wailed in agony and Valter was outraged. The golden sand clumped crimson with his wyvern’s blood and its entrails. Eirika turned around, flicked her sword, flicked its blood around and she glared down Valter.

He lunged at her. Lance at the ready but he missed. The fury in his beady eyes was palpable, she saw. Up close. Too close. He tried to attack again, a thrust one-eighty, and Eirika parried it.

Valter licked his lips. He grunted, relishing how her sword and his lance ate at each other but Eirika prevailed. Despite her boots sinking into the coarse sand, she was deft. She moved away from him and then thrust through him in his elegant sloth. Just like many more men who used the lance, he wasn’t used to using it at unusual angles. To and fro such weapons went unlike the curvaceous sword which Eirika was proficient in.

His wyvern expired in the sand. Its hulking body unmoving and now it was time for Valter to do the same – and so, Eirika resolved.

Her rapier pierced his midsection. He gasped. In pain. Mottled with spittle and blood from his fanged mouth. Eirika pulled back her rapier once more. She flicked yet more blood into the cloying sands underfoot. Valter gasped, choked on his breath and his spit and his blood, and he tried to reach out to her. There was an impressed viciousness in his eyes. She could see it and locking onto them, Eirika thrust forth. His movements slowed. Impaired. And Eirika all too easily finished him off.

He seemed to relish the bloodshed. Even though he knew that he was dying. That he had been killed. That Eirika had killed him. Disgust knotted inside of Eirika from the deepest recesses of her soul as she saw that revolting expression on Valter’s face as he spat out his deep and poetic last words.

A groan. A last breath and a last revelation before nothing. “Urggh... Gaaaaah!”

Eirika was stony and still as she sheathed her sword. Blood and all into the crimson scabbard from whence it had come. And then her heart quavered. Her wrist burned and the sun cast down its radiance just that little bit harder, boiling her blood under the scorched skin.

Surely not, she told herself as she took the moment, a corpse in front of her, to be frivolous and self-indulgent and wrongly romantic. Eirika licked her lips, no saliva at all in her mouth or on her tongue, as she removed her glove so that she could look at her wrist.

Surely not, she told herself as she lunged at that corpse. It was impossible, she was certain – or at the very least tried to be. She cringed in pain as the coarse grains of sands raked against her skin as she wrestled with Valter’s limp body. He was dead. Completely and utterly dead.

Eirika grabbed at his hand and she yanked off his gloves; dragonhide and worn soft. Her heart hammered and her eyes widened as she read the script written upon his wrist, hiding once blue veins. A gorgeous red and she recognised the style. It was her own and it was her own words which were written there.

“I will not be stopped by the likes of you.”

Eirika felt smothered by those words now proven wrong. She may have killed him but it appeared that he had won the last laugh for she was very much stopped in her way by him as she tried to grapple with the consequences of her actions. It was a simple plan of logic, she thought.

People had the final words their soulmates speak to them on their wrists. They both had the matching ends of that conversation tattooed on their bodies. She had killed him. Ergo, she had killed her soulmate.

The epiphany was grim and it harrowed Eirika to a very dark part of her soul.

And though she knew not to cry, not for him, her awful enemy, and not for the desert, so dry and unforgiving, Eirika cried regardless. Sobbed. She held onto his body, face to his breast, and bawled.

Her strange submission and stranger remorse caught the eye of her rear guard, Seth and Vanessa, but neither knew what to do.

They knew even less when Eirika’s tears turned to resolve. She raised her sword again and began to hack at his armour. Over and over, chipping at it until it eventually broke into pieces for her to push away. They sank into the sand and she continued to hack at Valter’s body. She tore the cloth of his clothes away and she opened up his chest.

It was difficult and bloody work, Eirika’s arms ached as she tried to divide open Valter’s body with her rapier, but she did her best. In the midst of such viscera, she found her treasure. Valter’s heart. If she was supposedly fated to have his heart, then she would keep it as per her duty as her soulmate and what a marvellous peculiarity that his heart was.

Eirika let go of Valter. His body slackened over her lap, as though he were sleeping. His desecrated body spewed odours and blood but Eirika was all but immune to it as she examined what she had found in the chambers of his chest. His heart had opalized, somehow. She didn’t understand, all knew was that it was both of flesh and moonstone. She kept it close to herself. Hugging it as it was all that was left of her apparent soulmate and knowing that it was all that she could keep of him since, in the harsh conditions of war, this was likely to be his final resting place.

Oh, how such knowledge agonised Eirika as she held tightly onto his strange heart as a precious memento of things which were never destined to have come to pass.


End file.
